Clocks are set back and winter coats are out of storage. What better way to warm up than with an award-winning coffee being roasted by Iowa’s Ross Street Roasting Co? This coffee is a winner both as espresso and filter, so read on!
Purchase this coffee directly for $24/12oz
ROSS STREET ROASTING CO. NICARAGUA PACAMARA NATURAL
Ross Street Roasting Co. was founded by Brian Gumm in the small central Iowa town of Toledo in 2015. After over a year of hobby roasting in his garage on Ross Street, word-of-mouth started picking up, as well as online sales. I had reviewed some of Brian’s coffee early on and helped hook him up with MyCoffeePub’s monthly subscription and he was the featured roaster one month. In 2016, Brian moved into a small production facility in nearby Tama, Iowa and the company had great growth in 2017. It’s exciting to see roasters grow from a hobby in the garage to a legitimate business and there is only one sustainable way to do that in the coffee business, and that’s by starting with really good coffee!
This morning, I’m taking a look at Ross Street Roasting Co.’s Nicaragua Pacamara Natural. This is a light roast blended from three growers in the Jinotega region of Nicaragua. Juan Carlos, Don Manuel and Don Sabino work with Gold Mountain Coffee Growers in Nicaragua, who works with all aspects of growing, processing and exporting coffee from that country. Ross Street has a very limited supply of this coffee, which I suspect is listed (and sold out) on Gold Mountain’s site as their “Brix Breaker.” If that is the case, this coffee has won multiple Golden Bean awards in the hands of other roasters.
These coffees were grown around 1415masl and this lot is special because the unique microclimate in the area develops the large Pacamara cherries relatively slow, giving the fruit a long time to develop sugars. As a natural process coffee, these lots are hand sorted and then laid out on mesh beds to slowly dry in the sun like giant raisins before breaking open the fruit and getting the precious seeds (coffee “beans”) out for roasting. Brian gives us flavor notes of, “Deep/ripe tropical fruit, well balanced acidity and sweetness.” Yum!
Brian sent me this coffee to use both as an espresso and a filter coffee and it’s excellent as both. As a filter brew, I’m using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water. My brewer is a Trinity Origin and I’m using a Knock Aergrind. This is a really light roast, so grinding in a manual grinder was no easy feat! These dense beans don’t hold onto a lot of water, so my brews went relatively quickly at about 3:15 including the 30 second bloom.
This coffee has a nice tropical fruit aroma that just screams “red” to my brain, even though most tropical fruits I know about aren’t red at all! LOL Taking a sip, this straddles the edge between medium-heavy and heavy body with a slick, syrupy mouthfeel. The fruits pops out of this coffee right from the beginning of the sip. I’m getting a sweet base of apple with high notes all reading very tropical. There’s a little pineapple in there, with its accompanying slight tartness, some mango and guava. The balance of this cup leans toward the bright side of things, with some fruity tartness cresting in the midsip, but there is plenty of sweetness to balance that out and ride into a sweet finish with a super long, fruity aftertaste. In some sips I’m getting a flash of coriander here and there, too. For a natural coffee, the fermentation notes in this coffee are minimal, so I’m getting all the fruit complexity of a well-done natural coffee without the ferment that often accompanies it (although I actually like ferment notes in coffee, so I don’t mind them when they are present, either).
This is a fantastic coffee as a pourover. As it cools it just gets better and better, so spend some time with this coffee and let it stretch out and you will not be disappointed in the least.
Espresso
For November, my focus/theme is squarely on espresso and this is one of the coffees Brian sent me to feature during “espresso month” here. It did not disappoint! This coffee was a little finicky for me to get dialed in and I was enjoying shots pulled both in the “normal” 1:2 ratio in 25-30 seconds range as well as shots that produced more volume and ran a little longer, too. This is an intense espresso and it leans heavily into the fruity realm, so fans of Italian-style espresso with chocolate and roast notes won’t find what they are looking for. I like espresso in all its forms, and this one is KILLER!
My best shot was actually the one I just made as I was typing this post and my bag was roasted Oct. 2. I know this will make some armchair espresso warriors cringe and rampage about how “stale” this coffee is, but it’s still doing EXCEPTIONALLY well as both espresso and pourover and I think a long rest for this coffee has only improved every aspect of it. I started pulling shots when it was about 10-14 days old, the normal window for most espresso, and it has improved since then. Tastebuds can’t lie.
Because I know the espresso nerds care, my setup is a Gaggia Classic tuned to 9 bars using the “blind OPV” method. Grinder is a Rancilio Rocky. Bottomless aftermarket portafilter using a Decent Espresso 20g precision basket and matched Decent Espresso tamper calibrated to 25lbs of pressure. I WDT the grounds in the portafilter, although this coffee barely clumps at all for me, then I groom the PF with an OCD-style leveler and, finally, the tamper. Using a 20g dose I was aiming for the 35-40g espresso range in 25-30 seconds. Shots are a little on the intense side with this recipe, but the flavors are awesome.
I’m getting pineapple and a lot of tart cherry. This is a really fruity shot, “third wave” all the way. There’s single origin, high cacao percentage dark chocolate in there if you look for it and plenty of lemon acidity, too. If I go a long time between sips, the aftertaste changes into Smucker’s strawberry jam and this couldn’t be a clearer flavor not for me if I tried! LOL Sometimes I have to use some artistic license to make comparisons between what I am tasting and my previous experiences, but not this time. This aftertaste was the same as a spoonful of Smucker’s, 100%!
Overall, this is a fantastic coffee. This won’t be around for long, and at $24 this is a relatively pricey coffee, but celebrate Autumn and go ahead and treat yourself, and don’t be afraid to take your time with this one both in drinking it as well as letting it get some age on it. I think this coffee just hit its stride at 4 weeks out and I’ll take the heresy hit from any naysayers! A home run from Brian and Ross Street Roasting Co.!